


letters written with your heart in your throat

by querxes



Series: letters [1]
Category: Newsies - All Media Types, Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Canon Era, Love Letters, M/M, News Media, Period-Typical Homophobia, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:27:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25006930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/querxes/pseuds/querxes
Summary: Your Fave is Queer: Will David Jacobs be the next to join the list of historic queer authors?Historians discover a series of letters written from renowned author David Jacobs to a lover named "Francis," who may be tied to more historical evidence than one might expect.
Relationships: David Jacobs/Jack Kelly
Series: letters [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1837273
Comments: 31
Kudos: 135





	letters written with your heart in your throat

**Author's Note:**

> Pride Month's not over yet.
> 
> This is not stellar, I know. But I had this idea a while ago where I wanted letters from the past to be recovered written from Davey to Jack, but make Davey a famous renowned author and the actual Newsboys' Strike of 1899 actually happened with the characters from the musical and they were not made up for fictional purposes. Also, the journalist's name is a twist on my own (because I, y'know, wrote it) but please don't go looking it up because it's a made-up name. You won't find me under that name. Thanks.

The LGBT+ Times

**Your Fave is Queer: Will David Jacobs be the next to join the list of historic queer authors?**

_By Marisol Jamieson_

_Tuesday, June 30, 2020_

Author David Jacobs is known for his most famous works such as _The Zoo, Castle Garden,_ and _Children Without Honor,_ all of which failed miserably on their initial releases and only grew in popularity nearly ten years after his death. To this day, they are all considered literary classics. His novel _Castle Garden_ is read in literature classes across the United States (next to works such as _The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice,_ and _To Kill a Mockingbird)_ as a brilliant example of the immigration experience many families faced in the late 19th century.

Jacobs was born in 1882 in what would later become an independent Poland before immigrating to the United States when he was seven years old. His later childhood was spent in a Jewish-based tenement in Manhattan, New York. He is also thought to be one of the strike leaders of the famous Newsboys’ Strike of 1899, which has since been turned into both a 1992 motion picture and an award-winning Broadway musical under the name Newsies. Never in his life did Jacobs confirm the rumors, but his name and appearance were used for the character Davey, Jack Kelly’s co-Union leader and close friend. 

Earlier this month, Jacobs’ living family (consisting of his brother's great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren) gave a group of historians access to some of Jacobs’ old unreleased work. What was discovered were children’s books never released by Jacobs, all pages fully illustrated by an artist with the name of J.F. Kelly. This revelation made people’s heads shoot up—Could this even possibly be the same man as Jack Kelly? Not only did that raise eyebrows, but the historians dug even deeper to discover letters hidden in the pages of the unreleased books.

In the pages were love letters written by Jacobs to someone by the name of ‘Francis.’ Jacobs never married in his lifetime, but historians believe that ‘Francis’ is the same person as J.F. Kelly, and very possibly the same as Jack Kelly, the leader of the Newsboys’ Strike of 1899, the same strike that Jacobs was rumored to have participated in. The exact duration of their romantic relationship is not completely known, but the letters that were found spanned several years, starting from 1901 and ending in 1905, the year before Jacobs’ death. Sections in the letters claim that the relationship actually started for both of them at the age of seventeen, framing the exact time of the Newsboys’ Strike of 1899. Their relationship in the letters cannot be confused as anything different from what it was.

* * *

_7 October 1902_

_Francis,_

_There are so many words that can’t be spoken in public, so instead I write them down and hope our silence can be properly translated in our own ways. I let my mind take me back to when we first met, and how we could just be children with no clue. The weight of society, while increasingly becoming pressed against our shoulders with age and the better knowledge, seems like a distant dream. I feel like there’s so much I’ve forgotten about those moments we shared, however small they were. I have forgotten how it felt to share a bed without being terrified for our lives. I remember when you could grab my wrist and pull me along in public and no one would hardly care. We still had our childlike innocence, despite being seventeen years old and on the cusp of adulthood._

_Age has not been kind to you. The older we grew, the more exhausted you became. Years of breaking your back at the docks when you could’ve ran far, far away, reminded me of how hard you were fighting. For us? For the belief that times would change on their own, that maybe one day we could walk hand-in-hand, side-by-side, and society would let us walk by. Maybe they’d even cheer for us. We could imagine that I was a celebrated author and you were my artist husband, using your drawings with my novels to bring in an income big enough to have the wedding my mother had always dreamed of me having. We could even adopt two, three, four kids and maybe a cat and dog to go along with them. We could buy a comfortable house upstate where all of our friends could come visit us, and maybe we could even have a vacation house out west like you’ve always dreamed._

_When faced with what could’ve been, I find it hard to sleep at night. You’ve always known that my thoughts always keep me up, how my mind races faster and faster until I have pages written in my mind that I will easily forget in the morning. You are kept awake for a completely different reason. You are faced with the dread of going back to work the next early stinking morning, and the next, and the next, without reprieve. And my books could never save us from that life, no matter how hard I try. The words spill out and onto pages that no one ever reads._

_But I will keep my head up. We cannot afford to do anything differently these days. We will continue to scrape together the pennies and hope that no one will think otherwise of two bachelors living together to save some money. It is too much to say out loud. I live in terror of the neighbors overhearing us, and I know you feel the same way. I recognize that look in your eye where I can tell you are holding back, and you are mad about it._

_I love you. More than the stars in the sky, more than the blades of grass there are in Santa Fe, more than I can possibly say outside of locked doors. I will hold your hand tightly, steal kisses underneath the moonlight, and I will beg God to make it be enough to last, to show you how much I love you._

_Yours forever,_

_David_

* * *

Along with the dozens of recovered letters, illustrations were found for each of the released novels written by Jacobs, all with the same name J.F. Kelly in the far right corner. The illustrations were never published with any of the works as Jacobs didn’t have the monetary means in his lifetime, but publishing companies have started to consider releasing versions of Jacobs’ novels with its rightful illustrated covers. 

In honor of Pride Month, Jacobs’ children’s books that were named _The Wandering Bard of Helsignør, The Puppets of Prague,_ and _The Alleyway Poppets and Others,_ the latter of which depicts children of all different backgrounds in an incredibly progressive, positive way for its time, are being mass-produced and released, all with original illustrations and writing. A more critical piece will also be published; tentatively named _Cogs in the Machine,_ which delves into homosexuality in class and heavily criticizes the government and the laws in play at the time. It was completely written in Polish, likely in an attempt to keep it from being read by the wrong people in the days it was written. On top of the release in its original Polish, the work will be translated into eight more languages at the time of its release in 2021: Jacobs’ own languages Yiddish, Hebrew, and English as well as Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, German, and Italian. It is hopeful that more languages will be added to the list.

Jacobs died in 1905 from tuberculosis at the age of 23, and Kelly died years later at the age of 62 in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he was buried with his family. Both the living families of Jacobs and Kelly have stepped forward with this new information and have asked for the memories of the two men to be preserved as it was—Two men who were in love with each other when it was illegal to be at the time. These publishings with their proper illustrations are to celebrate the resilience and bravery of two men at the turn of the century who were ahead of their time, who yearned to make a change. 

Since the discovery, there have been talks of a revival of _Newsies! The Broadway Musical_ and possibly even a new motion picture with the storyline altered to display and bring forth the newly-discovered relationship between the characters of Jack and Davey while still keeping its women characters like Katherine Plumber in a place of importance. The addition of Sarah Jacobs—Davey’s twin sister—into the musical is also being petitioned for, and is likely to be successful.

Someday, the world will be cheering for David Jacobs and Jack Kelly, just like Jacobs had imagined it. Whether it happens on the stage, in the movie theatre, or on the release of Jacobs’ unpublished works, they will be celebrated and remembered in a way they couldn’t have been during their lives. We put up yet another plaque on the wall to honor their memory and legacy, and while the past keeps its head down in shame, we raise our heads and our voices for the change the past desperately longed to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!  
> Let me know what you think!  
> Come yell at me on tumblr @thetruthabouttheboy or my main @querxes


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